by John Keay
In the fourth century BC the Mauryas had been able to extend their rule into politically virgin territories where state-formation, if it existed at all, had been in its infancy. Ashoka had carefully noted several foreign kings in his inscriptions but within India he found not one sovereign worthy of being so named; the ‘Cholas’ and ‘Keralaputras’ were families or clans; even Kalinga was just a place and a people. In such a vacuum, Mauryan empire had a pioneering quality and was necessarily one of agricultural settlement, administrative decree and fiscal organisation.
Six hundred years later the Guptas may have found a similar situation in Bengal and have pursued similar policies there. Elsewhere they faced more advanced opponents who were already administering their own states and taxing their own subjects. The submission of all these now carefully named and previously unconquered kings was, of course, most gratifying; ‘the Beloved of the Gods’ had been merely a raja, a ‘king’; the Guptas were maharajadhirajas, ‘kings of kings’. On the other hand they also recognised the difficulty of trying permanently to engross such distant and confident kingdoms. It was more expedient to content themselves with the rich pickings of conquest and to retain the option of perhaps repeating this feat when more such pickings had accumulated.
It also seems that the criteria associated with the status of cakravartin did not include sustained government or direct control. In the case of distant rulers a nominal submission looks to have been sufficient, while of those nearer at hand regular attendance on the cakravartin was also required. As will emerge, a world-ruler did not actually have to rule the world; it was enough that the world should acknowledge him as such; in fact his status as a maharajadhiraja was dependent on the survival of rajas, both within and beyond his arya-varta, who were powerful enough to justify the title. ‘The point here was not to do away with other kings as such and produce a single, absolute kingship, blessed by a monotheist deity, for all India.’ Tributary rajas, or kings, were essential as validating and magnifying agents. In the same way as local cults and lesser deities were harnessed to the personae of Lords Vishnu or Shiva, so lesser rulers were inducted into an enhancing relationship with the ‘world-ruler’. Precedence and paramountcy were what mattered, not governance or integration. ‘What distinguished an imperial court politically, and especially one whose king claimed to be the universal king of India, was that it was primarily a society of kings.’14
Samudra-Gupta’s immediate successors maintained his elevated status and continued his policies. No inscription as detailed as the Allahabad testimonial is available for any of them, but from minor inscriptions, coins and literary sources it is clear that the Gupta ‘empire’ now climbed to its ambiguous zenith. There were, however, setbacks and compromises. A sixth-century drama tells of a Rama-Gupta who is thought to have briefly succeeded Samudra-Gupta and who attempted to ‘uproot’ the Western Satraps in Malwa.15 The attempt went badly wrong. Rama-Gupta was defeated and, when he tried to disengage, he was informed that the price of escape would be the surrender of his queen. According to a much later biography, the Shaka Satrap sorely coveted the lovely Queen Dhruvadevi. No doubt she had been represented to him as lotus-eyed, with thighs like banana stems, and all the other ripe attributes of desirable womanhood as detailed in textual tradition and epitomised in the yaksi temptresses of Mathura and Sanchi sculpture. Aflame with desire, ‘the lustful Shaka king’ was adamant; Rama-Gupta, hopelessly unworthy of such a desirable consort, conceded defeat and agreed to hand her over.
But the ignominy was too much for Rama-Gupta’s younger brother. The latter somehow disguised himself as the shapely Dhruvadevi, was duly given entry to the enemy camp, and promptly slew the Satrap. He must also have made his escape for, Rama-Gupta having been irrevocably disgraced by this affair, it was the righteous brother who now took over the reins of empire as Chandra-Gupta II. He may have had to kill Rama-Gupta in the process; more certainly it was he who eventually claimed the hand of Dhruvadevi.
Not surprisingly Chandra-Gupta II’s main offensive was a continuation of this struggle against the Shaka Satraps. Judging by inscriptions in and around Sanchi he seems to have been in eastern Malwa for some years, presumably while he conducted the necessary campaigns. Patience was eventually rewarded. By the year 409 Chandra-Gupta II was issuing silver coins to replace those of the Satraps. The Shaka territories in western India had been annexed to those of the Guptas, and of the Western Satraps no more is heard.
The Guptas thus secured their western frontier and inherited whatever remained of the cultural traditions established by the Sanskrit-loving Rudradaman and his successors. On the evidence of a Buddhist site in northern Gujarat (Devnimori) which may date to about 375, it has been suggested that Gupta sculpture and architecture owed several motifs and design features to western India. It may also be significant that the cultural achievements usually associated with the Guptas are little in evidence in the fourth century and only become established after Chandra-Gupta II’s conquest of the Satraps.
Success against the Satraps also gave the Guptas access to the ports of Gujarat and to the profits of its international maritime trade. There and throughout central India, just as the Satraps had once become embroiled with their Shatavahana trading neighbours, so the Guptas became involved with the Vakatakas, the dynasty which had succeeded the Shatavahanas as the dominant power in the Deccan.
For once, war was not the outcome; perhaps the campaigns against the Satraps were taking their toll. Instead, the Guptas opted for a dynastic alliance whereby Chandra-Gupta II’s daughter was married to Rudrasena II, the Vakataka king. The latter soon died and during the ensuing regency (C390–410) it was Prabhavati, this Gupta queen, who as regent controlled the Vakataka state in accordance with Gupta policy. Thereafter the Vakatakas continued as allies and associates of the imperial Guptas.
Other dynastic pairings suggest that the Guptas often made intelligent use of the prestige which attached to the maharajadhiraja’s bed-chamber. Prabhavati was Chandra-Gupta II’s daughter not by the coveted Dhruvadevi but by a princess of the Naga dynasty. This was an ancient lineage which seems to have re-established itself in Mathura and other parts to the west and south of the Jamuna in the wake of Kushana retraction. Since Samudra-Gupta had earlier ‘violently exterminated’ the Naga king, it would seem that marriage was used to consolidate existing acquisitions as well as to neutralise external rivals.
Chandra-Gupta II, like his predecessor Samudra-Gupta and his successor Kumara-Gupta, reigned for about forty years. Such longevity over three generations is exceptional and must have been another important factor in the stability of Gupta rule. Of further Gupta feats there is little evidence, the only notable exceptions being a doubtful record of far-flung campaigns by Chandra-Gupta II and an important defensive role undertaken during the reign of Kumara-Gupta.
The former, the campaigns sometimes attributed to Chandra-Gupta II, are recorded in a short inscription engraved on a pillar located at Mehrauli, once a village on the outskirts of Delhi. The pillar, unlike the stone pillars, or lats, of Ashoka, is made of iron, and the village is better known as the site where Delhi’s twelfth-century sultans would build the renowned Qutb minar and mosque. It is in fact the famously rust-resistant ‘Iron Pillar’ which now stands in the main courtyard of the mosque and attracts hordes of visitors, many of them convinced that wish-fulfilment awaits those whose arms are long enough to embrace its trunk. Fortunately out of reach, as it might otherwise have been erased by this activity, the inscription commemorates the erection of the pillar as ‘a lofty standard of the divine Vishnu’. Its donor was one ‘Chandra’, supreme world conqueror ‘on whose arm fame was inscribed by the sword when in battle in the Vanga countries’ and who, having ‘crossed in warfare the seven mouths of the [river] Sindhu’ defeated the ‘Vahlikas’. He also perfumed the breezes of the southern ocean with his prowess. Unfortunately no date is mentioned and, worse still, there is no sign of the word ‘Gupta’. ‘Chandra’ could therefore as well have b
een a Chandra-sena or a Chandra-varman, both attested kings of the period. And if a Chandra-Gupta, which one? Straining for clarification, scholars, even long-armed epigraphists, find their wishes unfulfilled. The identity of this fragrant ‘Chandra’ remains a mystery, as does the technology which enabled Guptan smelters to cast an iron obelisk of such rust-resistant purity that sixteen hundred monsoons have scarcely pitted its surface or defaced its inscription.
There is also doubt about this Chandra’s listed conquests. ‘Vanga’, like Anga, was an ancient janapada in west Bengal; the ‘Sindhu’ is usually the Indus; and the ‘Vahlikas’ have been taken to be the Bactrians. But military successes at such distant poles of the subcontinent strain credulity. In the west no corroborative evidence of Gupta intervention beyond the Indus, let alone beyond the Hindu Kush, is available. However, most of Bengal definitely was within the Gupta ambit. In fact the Guptas were the first north Indian dynasty to extend their rule into and across the heavily forested maze of swamps and waterways that was the Ganga-Brahmaputra delta. Hitherto little exposed to Aryanising influences except along its western seaboard, nearly all of Bengal was now claimed by the Guptas, and it seems reasonable to suppose an accelerated process of drainage, clearance and settlement. From the ruins of the Gupta empire would emerge east and central Bengal’s first historical states, amongst which Vanga would be eminent.
Kumara-Gupta, who ruled from C415 to C455, faced a different challenge. In his reign there seems to have been a major uprising in Malwa by one Pushyamitra. Briefly, in the words of the only inscription which refers to it, it ‘ruined the fortunes of the Gupta family’. Soon after there first appeared on the Indian scene the Hunas, otherwise described as a new breed of mlecchas (incomprehensible foreigners). These newcomers were a branch of the Hiung-nu of Chinese history and the Huns of European history. In a new wave of central Asian displacement, an offshoot of this horde, the Ephthalites or White Huns, had established themselves in Bactria in the late fourth century (thus making a Gupta conquest there unlikely). In the mid-fifth they followed their Yueh-chi/Kushana predecessors across the Hindu Kush and into Gandhara, and thence they pushed east against the Guptas.
Fortunately the Guptas produced a champion worthy of the occasion. In one inscription Skanda-Gupta, a son of Kumara-Gupta, is described as ‘subsisting like a bee on the wide-spreading water-lilies which were the feet of his father’. The bee, though, had a sting. It was Skanda-Gupta who took the field successfully against the upstart Pushyamitra. He then made good a doubtful claim to succeed his father. And finally, if only temporarily, he repulsed the Huns.
It was also during the reign of Skanda-Gupta, he who ‘made subject the whole earth bounded by the waters of the four oceans and full of thriving countries round the borders of it’, that the last major addition was made to the great rock outside Junagadh in the Saurashtra peninsula. Following the inscriptions of Ashoka and Rudradaman, this third inscription tells of Skanda-Gupta’s governor in Gujarat and of his son. Both paragons of virtue, they built a massive embankment when Rudradaman’s reservoir was in its turn overwhelmed by floodwaters, and they also added a temple.
But if the temple was meant to guarantee the dam’s future security, it failed. Not even a trace of the irrigation system which prompted this unique series of inscriptions beneath the crags of Girnar remains. The rulers of Saurashtra soon deserted Junagadh, perhaps after another disastrous flood, and by 500 a new capital had been established at Vallabhi in the east of the peninsula. Only the hump-backed rock, converted into a book ‘by the aid of the iron pen’, still mutely protests the majesty of Junagadh’s distinguished benefactors.
A similar fate, redeemed only by the tenacity of tradition, now overtook the Gupta empire. After the death of Skanda-Gupta in C467, his nephew Budha-Gupta, then another nephew, his son and then his grandson continued to claim world dominion well into the sixth century. But their reigns were mostly brief and it is clear that by 510 other Guptas, who may or may not have been related to them, operated as independent rulers within the core area of the erstwhile empire. In that year the Huns, led by a formidable leader called Toramana, were again on the move. They overran Kashmir and the Panjab and defeated a Gupta army near Gwalior, thus extending their rule to Malwa. In the face of such disarray, even the fiction of the Guptas’ universal sovereignty was unsustainable. Their golden reputation fades from history as the famous gold coinage, debased under Skanda-Gupta, becomes crudely cast, increasingly stereotyped, of rare occurrence, and then non-existent.
THE GUPTA UTOPIA
‘Perfection has been attained,’ declares the last of the three Junagadh inscriptions. ‘While he [Skanda-Gupta] is reigning, verily no man among his subjects falls away from dharma; there is no one who is distressed, in poverty, in misery, avaricious, or who, worthy of punishment, is over-much put to torture.’ Such a glowing depiction of Gupta society is to be expected from a royal panegyric. It is, however, corroborated by an alien and presumably impartial eye-witness.
The people are very well off, without poll tax or official restrictions … The kings govern without corporal punishment; criminals are fined according to circumstance, lightly or heavily. Even in cases of repeated rebellion they only cut off the right hand. The king’s personal attendants, who guard him on the right and the left, have fixed salaries. Throughout the country the people kill no living thing nor drink wine, nor do they eat garlic or onions, with the exception of the Chandalas only.16
To Fa Hian (Fa-hsien, Faxian, etc.), a Buddhist pilgrim from China who visited India in C400–410, Chandra-Gupta II’s realm was indeed something of a utopia. Descending to India by the Karakoram trail, Fa Hian travelled the length of the Gangetic basin in perfect safety as he visited everywhere of note associated with the Buddha’s life. Only the lot of the Chandalas he found unenviable; outcastes by reason of their degrading work as disposers of the dead, they were universally shunned and had to give warning of their approach so that fastidious caste-members could take cover. But no other sections of the population were notably disadvantaged, no other caste distinctions attracted comment from the Chinese pilgrim, and no oppressive caste ‘system’ drew forth his surprised censure. Peace and order prevailed. And if the peace was the peace of past conquests and the order the rigid social hierarchy of varna and the professional exclusivity of jati, no one was complaining.
From other sources we glimpse a society industrious as well as contented. Those highly influential guilds (sreni) regulated elaborate systems of quality control, pricing, distribution and training for every craft and calling. They also acted as bankers, even to the royal court; and their sresthin, or aldermen, met regularly in a joint council that has been likened to a chamber of commerce. Trade continued to flourish, both within India and overseas. When Fa Hian returned to China he did so not by the long overland route but aboard an Indian vessel sailing from Tamralipti in Bengal. After a near-shipwreck off the Burma coast he reached ‘Ye-po-ti’, which could be Java, Sumatra or Malaya. There, as also in Indo-China, he reported that ‘Brahmans flourish although the law of the Buddha is not much known.’ After more nautical mishaps, he regained China, again in the company of brahmans and so probably aboard an Indian ship.
In Fa Hian’s account of India, Magadha is made to sound especially impressive. Its towns were the largest and its people the richest and most prosperous as well as the most virtuous. True, some Buddhist sites already partook of the archaeological. Kapilavastu, the Sakyas’ ancient capital and the Enlightened One’s birthplace, was ‘like a great desert’ with ‘neither king nor people’; and of Ashoka’s palace in Pataliputra only the ruins remained. But for a Buddhist there was also much to celebrate. Stupas in their thousands, some many-tiered and of gigantic proportions, dotted the landscape – much as they still do today at centres outside India like Pagan in Burma. But then, unlike now, Buddhism still enjoyed the support of large sections of Indian opinion. The monasteries were well-endowed; their monks could be numbered in thousands. Eight ce
nturies after the Buddha, only Sri Lanka was more Buddhist. For Samudra-Gupta it had been particularly gratifying to receive a Sri Lankan embassy whose gifts, coupled with a request for permission to build a monastery on the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment at Buddh Gaya, he took to represent a form of tribute.
Not much concerned with political affairs, Fa Hian says nothing of the Gupta court nor of Chandra-Gupta II, its then maharajadhiraja. Perhaps, as was normal during the dry season, the court was on the move, receiving the obeisances and consuming the produce of its subject kings or conducting hostilities with the Satraps. In Pataliputra, which along with Ujjain seems to have served as the Gupta capital, the Chinese visitor was more impressed by an annual festival. It was marked by a magnificent procession of some twenty wheeled stupas whose bristling towers accommodated images of the gods decorated with gold and silver as well as sitting figures of the Buddha attended by standing Boddhisatvas. As the procession approached the city Fa Hian watched ‘the brahmacharis come forth to offer their invitations; the Buddhas then, one after another, enter the city’.17
As between the orthodox and the heterodox sects ecumenism was still the norm. The Guptas, although identifying themselves with Lord Vishnu and performing Vedic sacrifices, encouraged endowments to both Buddhist and brahman establishments with even-handed munificence. Yet the physical separation of the two communities, as implied in Fa Hian’s account, may be significant. Buddhist monasteries were usually located outside the main centres of population and influence, near enough for collecting alms and instructing the laity but far enough for tranquillity and seclusion. The ‘brahmacharis’, on the other hand, technically brahman students but here implying the whole brahman educational establishment, were now located within the city and close to the court.